It was night when I arrived back in Los Angeles, and driving home, I could see a thirty-foot can of spinach being tugged down Hollywood Boulevard, spot-lit, surrounded by limousines. There really is no place like it. Early evening almost two weeks later, I was walking around my front room and listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Point Blank when the phone rang. It was Holly Wertheimer, the film editor, calling from New York, and she was crying.
“Have you heard?” said Holly.
“Heard what?” I thought something had gone wrong with the production. People get tired and emotional.
“They’ve shot John.”
“What?”
“They shot John.”
“Is he all right?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” There was silence. Over the phone line I could hear the radio, and out the window the never-ending sound of New York horns blaring, and ambulances.
“It’s on the radio . . . They’re saying something. Oh, no! Oh, God! He’s dead.”
Holly crying on the phone.
“These things happen all the time,” I said. I don’t know what I meant. So many dead people. I said good-bye to Holly, told her I’d call her back.
It didn’t sink in. It didn’t mean anything. All 1 could think of was the film. That we had the last film of John and Yoko, and that now it was precious and had to be protected. The negative was with the lab in New York. Yoko had to have it.
I called Jayme Lubarr, who was now handling the production. The negative had to be released and then placed in safe-deposit until it could be transferred to Yoko. Lawyers were called, flown to New York. Releases were gotten, the negative taken from the laboratory and finally gotten into Yoko’s possession. It seemed all I could do.
The next few days were grim; even Hollywood seemed subdued. In the newspapers there appeared the awful picture of Yoko, grimacing, as the flash bulbs freeze her and David Geffen as they leave John’s body. More pain than any person should be asked to bear.
1 walked into the hills of Carmel Valley six days later and sat silent for the ten minutes that Yoko had requested, as did many of my friends, each separately and alone, part of the hundred thousand in Central Park and who knows how many millions around the world. Mark David Chapman had come all the way from Hawaii and taken it upon himself to shoot John Lennon, standing and watching as John had taken the time to autograph a record for a fan earlier in the day. Imagine.
I couldn’t. It took about a year to sink in.
Unbelievably, Yoko finished the film “Woman.” She used stills from their past. She superimposed John’s face from the Imagine album cover over the (equally unbelievable) photo that a New York Post photographer had somehow managed to steal of John lying in the morgue. She used the film of them walking in Central Park. Shortly thereafter she would have herself filmed, alone, in Central Park in the winter and used that, cut with the film of the two of them in bed, for her song “Walking on Thin Ice.”
At the end of the filming in the gallery in SoHo, I told John that I would like to get a picture with him and how 1 always regretted I didn’t get one with The Beatles. He said, “Sure. You should hang on to your memories, they’re all you’ve got.”
(From ETHAN RUSSELL: AN AMERICAN STORY available here.)
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